It’s all starting!

Today I took delivery of my lovely new Kenwood Major Titanium 020. I was like a kid in a sweetshop undoing it & working it all out – I have always wanted one! Well this is going to be my product development tool for my new business. I’ve had to change my initial plans – long story & I won’t go there now. I will be starting small scale from home, with my range of great quality products from iwantnoneofthat with the brand name Mrs Furber’s Pantry. Now there’s a history there – almost 30 years ago, my Mum & Dad started a hobby business in their local market in Cheshire. It expanded & did really well & Mum, having become diabetic, got a huge fan base of her diabetic cakes & biscuits. They’ve since retired, sold off the bakery & the shops but just kept one market stall & converted an old garage into a bakery to continue the diabetic range, more like a hobby all over again in their 70′s!

So, building on from their idea, I’ve not only nicked their diabetic recipes, but I’m developing several other ‘free from’ ranges. The whole point of this is that the products will be good in their own right & suitable for everyone who also doesn’t have a dietary requirement. After all, why should Coeliacs for example have to suffer the awful expensive cardboard bread etc we see for sale in the supermarkets, & why should they have to have their own little Christmas pudding when you can get a family sized, great tasting one that’s suitable for everyone round the table. OK, I’m not Coeliac, Diabetic, lactose intolerant or any of that, but I like great food & don’t see why some people have to be left out of that!

So, I’m at the product development stage – out goes the old 15p hand whisk I bought as a student all those years ago, & in comes the lovely but over 3,000x more expensive (ouch!) Kenwood – already I’ve made hubby’s birthday cake with it & I can’t stop gently stroking it where I see the odd unpolished bit of its stainless steel exteri0r!

This week is Christmas Pudding week – I’ve actually had to pull out my old University degree knowledge to work on the ratios of various ingredients to hopefully make it all come together – I’m sourcing some pretty special ingredients so that I can come up with a great pudding that is (wait for it drum roll!) Gluten Free, Dairy Free, suitable for Diabetics & thereby also great for people on diets as it has no added sugar, & also vegetarian. Fingers crossed it works, & I’ll be looking for any volunteers to taste it & also storage test it for me.

Next few weeks will be more to come – I’ve still to perfect the perfect pastry, but I’m getting there & trying to source the right ingredients – sometimes it can be quite tricky, you think you’ve cracked it only to find the damned stuff has been cooked in or rolled in something wheat derived! Coming up are sponge cakes (already sussed I reckon), Christmas cakes with the secret ingredients from my granny, & much more. Any willing ‘tasters’ please………..!

Summer holidays!

Well I can’t believe the summer holidays are halfway through already! We had a great 2 weeks in Brittany – Le Ranolien at Perros Guirrec. What amazing scenery – rock sculptures like animals, lots of lovely coves round every corner, & mostley lovely weather – wow! ( and why does the UK not have such great pools & flumes etc as they have in Europe?) followed by a couple of nights at a campsite at the Normandy Beaches – that’s another story for another post!

I’ve been looking forward to the summer since quitting my job in May. Summer Holidays with the children are just the best thing! Now I was never the maternal type – returning to work after both pregnancies full time. But now do you know what I love best about time with the children? – it’s great just to be able to be  like a child again seeing things through their eyes. Last week I went crabbing for the first time in my life. Having not been brought up near the sea I had never done it before. The children loved it ‘when can we enter a competition?’ is all I get now! We should have really entered the Maldon one on Saturday, but smack in the middle of it I had agreed to ring the bells for a wedding back in Chelmsford. That said, having heard all the stories about how competitive crabbing competitions can be I’m glad we didn’t go anyway!

I need to think about work again soon I guess! I have a little idea for a business I might start myself, but ouch! my nest egg that was wrapped up in shares has massively reduced, so I may have to re-think just how I go about it! I’ll float the idea soon here & see what you all think about it. Meanwhile, we’re off to Cheshire & the Lake District for a while to see the Grandparents & Uncle Robert at www.greyhoundshap.co.uk

That’s just what I love about the summer holidays – take off, drive around the country, have fun & be a big kid again! Maybe we will get to swim in the highest pool in England this year www.shapswimmingpool.co.uk

The serious stuff starts once winter comes & they’re back at school (although I do miss being able to spend hours at the allotments in the summer hols, my pair just aren’t interested & after 2 weeks’ holiday there are currently more weeds than anything else!)

It started with a sunflower seed!

We’ve just come back from a mini break… to Cleethorpes! What possessed us to go there? Over a year ago I was given some sunflower seeds at the Best of Britain & Ireland show. The instructions were to grow them & send a photo of them, showing someone with them to show how tall they were, holding the original packet!

Now that has to be a classic case of a competition worth entering… some skill required (well a bit of effort & some potting compost), remember to keep the empty packet (not sure how I managed that) & send in a picture on time, remembering who to send it to. I wonder if anyone else entered?

The prize was either a spa break for 2 or a family break. I chose the family break & ended up with 2 nights B&B in Cleethorpes, together with an annual pass for 2 local attractions & 2 free meals.

Ginnie's

I have to say, I wondered what a B&B stay in Cleethorpes would be like, but we had a great time! Luckily the weather was really good, we were a stones throw from the sea (at the nicer end of the town). It just goes to show it’s what you make of it! I probably wouldn’t have even thought of a B&B in Cleethorpes for a family short break, but the seaside B&B Ginnie’s was lovely, run by a great couple, Kim & Francis who made us so welcome.

OK so it wasn’t like the 5* hotels we used to go to in the BC (before children) days. It was very comfortable, very clean & the breakfasts were great, and we had a large family room on the top floor (from where we could just see the sea!). ‘wee blondie’ loved it so much she wants us to go & live in Cleethorpes & littleman cried when we left! It was very wierd leaving somewhere & not having to pay the bill too!

It looks like Cleethorpes has had some considerable investment and improvements in the last few years. The children loved it there – they have a children’s play trail which must be 2 miles long. You follow these yellow duck feet along the seafront & find loads of things foc for kids to do – my pair loved the privet hedge maze, the noughts & crosses, snakes & ladders, hopscotch just to name a few, & it culminates at the discovery centre with a sandpit play area & a fab splash pool. The sea was the favourite though & they couldn’t get enough of it! We had days out thrown in as part of the prize too & struggled to fit everything in in the 3 days we had there!

The children’s favourite bit was the beach, right on our doorstep & free! My favourite part was the kitchen garden at Normanby Hall, but then that’s me, back to my gardening again.. probably one for another post!

Growing Tomatoes!

Well today I have been getting ready to plant out my tomatoes, which I have been growing from seed since March. I always grow tomatoes from seed, as the choice in garden centres etc. is awful, & I am so sick of tasteless Gardeners’ Delight & Shirley.  So I usually buy my seeds at the end of the season when there are half price seeds for sale (tomato seeds are fine kept for a year or more), & in fact Thompson & Morgan have their seeds half price at the moment, if you’re prepared to pay the postage.

This year I’m amazed just how many varieties I have  – some tried and trusted & some new! So the run down is:

• Berry – a favourite, although not cheap – the seeds come in packs of only about 7 or 8 & at full price work out at about 40p each. Lovely flavour though, but you do have to watch that their skins don’t get tough.
• Rosada, like Berry, not cheap, but a lovely little tomato.
• Black Cherry – a new one for me this year. It will be interesting, it’s a dark skinned cherry variety.
• Pomodoro – a popular one but one I’ve never grown before, baby plum tomatoes.
• ‘Tomazing’ – a freebie from the papers a while ago. I paid about £3-4 postage for 6 plants.
• Alicante. Ermmm well I got these seeds free so they will go into the spare places in the alloment. I like to make spicy relishes and chutneys and larger size tomatoes are so much easier for this task, even if Alicante are a bit run of the mill. I have also popped some of these into the schools allotment which i am trying to get up & running again!
• Vilma. I like these because they’re a bush variety so don’t need training or sideshooting & can be popped into spare pots or again spaces on the allotment vacated by other plants. They produce quite nice little cherry tomatoes, not quite as flavoursome as my favourite Rosada, but the seeds are loads cheaper & the plants really easy to look after!

well that’s 7 varieties so far! But I do believe the telegraph are giving away free plants from Homebase tomorrow. Now I wonder what choice they’ll have, might I be able to add an 8th variety this year?

www.telegraph.co.uk/promotions/8530238/Two-free-tomato-plants-at-Homebase.html

Oh, & somewhere amongst that lot I have to fit in my son’s cucumber plants and my non gardening hubby’s chilli plants arghh!

Chocolate cake rescue

I thought I was being quite clever this week when I decided to make a big chocolate cake that the children could have in their packed lunch boxes! Somehow though, in my mad rush to get it cooked alongside tea I accidentally doubled the quantity of eggs, so I then doubled up everything else, made 2 cakes & went off to eat my tea. But, for the first time I can remember, the cakes were awful – honestly they looked like four giant ‘somethings’ the dog had left, & they tasted really dry & horrible.

So, nothing for it but to make a gooey chocolate trifle. Now last year out of the offcuts of birthday cakes I made a gorgeous black cherry trifle, using cherry brandy & cherries – it was yummy, but my DH didn’t like the cherries. So this time I used some manky old leftover oranges & Cointreau. The trifle looked a bit odd because true to form I went wrong again & forgot to add the chocolate custard, so it got poured around the outside of the cream, making it look a bit like a volcano. But hey-ho, it tasted nice anyway! So I’m going to put it on my new recipes page & if you ever have a disaster chocolate cake, out of a disaster can come something wonderful (and very alcoholic!).

Fresh strawberries

Well here they are! Not quite the first pickings, as I did have a few to munch myself on Tuesday while I was planting my beans! But this is the first crop large enough to share between all 4 of us! nothing quite beats the taste of freshly picked strawberries, & I do think 19th May is the earliest I have picked them before. This is the patch in my newer allotment and is only in its second season. The old patch at no. 1 allotment has tiny green strawberries still, and the patch the children planted all around their playhouse has plenty of fruit, but all are still green! Looks like we’ll be eating strawberries for a good few weeks this year, rather than as in the past, a bucketload (literally!) every few days only for a couple of weeks!

Self sufficient veg coming up?

Well, looking at all this lot, things are going to be getting very busy down at the allotments in the next couple of weeks. I’ve been holding off putting this lot out just yet, last year we had a frost 15th May, & this year, we lost potatoes in the frost on May 4th!

All this lot (and more!) have been grown from seed. I’ve got french beans, runner beans, pumpkins, courgettes, squashes, tomatoes, strawberries, brocolli, cabbage, chillies… and the list goes on! I had one disaster in the early hot weather when all my chilli seedlings & some of my tomatoes frazzled up in the heat while they were in the conservatory (which becomes a greenhouse during March & April!).

This year I’m growing some new tomatoes – well new to me! I’ve got Black Cherry and Pomodoro new to my list. I’m still growing my favourites, Rosada & Berry, but they are expensive even as seeds, costing about 50p per seed (unless you time it OK & get them in the half proce sale at the end of the season!). It will be interesting to see if these cheaper ones are as good. I do also like Vilma, cherry tomatoes that don’t have to be cordon trained. I can just pop them in any spare pots or gaps in the allotment & leave them to get on with it!

The little herb pots are coming on nicely too! These always stay by the kitchen door, just getting moved around as things change! I got a real ‘bargain’ from Aldi last week – 6 pots of herbs (basil, oregano, mint, marjoram, parsley and chives) reduced to 99p for the lot! The chives alone would cost more than that to buy in the supermarket! Talking of which, I’m determined never to buy supermarket herbs again this year. The coriander & basil are now well on their way!